49. The Death of Alice James

THE FINAL BIT of work on the manuscript for Psychology: Briefer Course was the section on how to dissect a sheep’s brain. James finished it on August 12,1891, then sent it to the publisher and took off by himself for a two-week trip in the mountains of North Carolina. He had been working almost steadily for two years, including substantial parts of two consecutive summers, and he felt he needed a complete break in a wholly new place. The trip stirred him to superlatives. Climbing Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Rockies, he called it “the most beautiful forest walk (only five hours) I ever made.” He also climbed Roan Mountain and Grandfather Mountain.¹ The Johnson City & Cranberry Railroad was “perhaps the wildest and most romantic little narrow-gauge concern that the world contains.” Linville was “simply the most high-toned and gentlemanly ‘land enterprise’ to be found on the continent,” and its roads “the only roads I have seen in America which resemble the great Swiss roads.”² James especially recommended that New Englanders should get out and see more of a country that contained such wonders.

This trip had another side, involving different scenery, which gave James a moment of insight that he would later write up in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” The blindness is that “with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.”³ “Some years ago,” he wrote,

 

whilst journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I passed by a large number of “coves” as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zig-zag rail fence around the scene of his havoc to keep the pigs and cattle out... The forest had been destroyed, and what had “improved” it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of nature’s beauty.

 

After more similarly gloomy meditation, James writes, “I said to the mountaineer who was driving me: ‘What sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?’ ‘All of us,’ he replied: ‘Why we ain’t happy here unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.’ I instantly felt,” James’s account goes on, “that I had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory.” It was not just other people who were blind; it was not only students to whom James was open.

The willingness to meet any new demand, which James had talked about to Hapgood, and the deliberate and restless openness—suggesting, too, how easily James became bored with work and the obligations at hand—means that much of James’s life, much of the direction of his attention, was not really under his control, and suggests that he preferred it that way. The calm life, the minutely controlled vector of ambition, the life devoted to one end only that we associate with his brother Henry, was never a possibility for William. At fifty he was still essentially at the mercy of any well-aimed claim upon him.

In September 1891, just back from North Carolina, he heard from Henry that Alice was “in a very alarming condition.”⁴ William felt that he had to see her, even though classes were about to start. Rushing to London by steamer and train, he found Alice very weak, able to lie only “in one position on the bed” and “in a profoundly miserable condition.” Yet she did her best to conceal it, talking about the coming London opening of Henry’s play The American and her own approaching end. Alice sternly refused to pity herself—it was always one of her strengths—and it was not vanity that made her unwilling to admit her misery to her visitor. She held firmly that it was William’s sensibilities that had to be protected. She was thus still stage-managing the grand domestic theatrical.

William was allowed only short visits of half an hour or so, which, he reported to his wife, were “very successful,” as he learned through Katharine, who said that his sister was “highly pleased” at his coming. William suggested hypnotism as an anodyne, in addition to the morphine she was already taking. Alice had every medical attention possible; she had been seen by the best physician in England. “It is hard to believe, from her animation,” William wrote home, “that she will not last long... She talks death incessantly, it seems to fill her with positive glee.”⁵

Because he had rushed over to say goodbye to Alice, William happened to be in London on September 20,1891, for the opening of The American. The first-night audience was full of writers, painters, millionaires, and ministers of state. Henry’s close friend and companion, Constance Fenimore Woolson, described the scene: “Pink satin, blue satin, jewels of all sorts, splendour on all sides of us. The house was packed to the top, and the applause was great. When the performance was ended, and the actors had been called out, there arose loud cries of ‘Author, author!’ After some delays, Henry James appeared before the curtain and acknowledged the applause. He looked very well, quiet and dignified, yet pleasant: he only stayed a moment.”⁶ Afterward there were supper parties, reviews, a tremendous to-do.

The contrast with Alice’s private drama at 41 Argyll Road in Kensington could not have been greater. After ten days, which had afforded him only a few short visits with Alice, William headed home, writing to his sister from the steamer some of the things he had left unsaid. Part of what he had to say was that Alice herself should not be left unexpressed; her voice was not to be lost. He foresaw how Harry would miss her conversation, and he added, “Between us we promise you to try to work some of it into Philosophy and the Drama so that it shall become a part of the world’s inheritance.”

The trip left him feeling a bit diminished himself. “I go back,” he told his sister, “to a life of which the main interest now is that of seeing that the children turn out well—insidious change in one’s ambitions brought about by life’s changing course. Your name will be a mere legend amongst them—until we are all legends.”⁷

Back home in early October, James found many interests plucking at his sleeves. He had, as usual, a full teaching load, though his share of the 176-student introduction to philosophy course he taught with Palmer and Royce would not begin until January. But his psychology course had 65 students (up from 25 the year before), including 9 grad students, and he taught a graduate seminar on aesthetics. He was one of the college advisers for freshmen, one of whom, this year, was his brother Bob’s son, Ned. There were also field trips, such as the one James took in May 1892 with sixteen grad students to interview the twelve-year-old Helen Keller. Keller later recalled that James “brought me a beautiful ostrich feather. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘you would like the feather, it is soft, light, and caressing.’”⁸

All fall he read the proofs of Psychology: Briefer Course, and on top of everything else he gave ten special lectures on topics of interest to teachers, such as “inhibition, association of ideas, attention, imagination, apperception, and will.” These lectures were the result of boiling down the already drastically shortened Psychology: Briefer Course by another 75 percent. They were the basis of similar lectures James was to give throughout the 1890s, published at last in 1899, in 110 pages, as Talks to Teachers.

But this book and its enormous popular success were far in the future. In November 1891 James was caught up in an unpleasant row between Frank Abbot and Josiah Royce. Abbot had temporarily taught in Royce’s place in 1888. His lectures were published as “The Way Out of Agnosticism,” which took an unnecessary slap at the Harvard philosophy department. Royce reviewed Abbot’s book, issuing from on high, as it were, a “professional warning to the liberal-minded public concerning Dr. Abbot’s philosophical pretensions.”⁹ Abbot replied with a fiery personal attack on Royce and an equally highhanded demand that Harvard discipline Royce for daring to speak as if he were the voice of Harvard.

Protracted and bitter negotiations over how to publish the volleys of replies and ripostes got out of hand. Royce was pompous, spoke ex cathedra; Abbot was troubled and troublesome. Royce brought in a lawyer. Charles Peirce weighed in with a letter in The Nation defending Abbot; James replied with a detailed defense of Royce. There was no light to be had, it was all personal, and James ended up defending harsh and intemperate reviewing when he intended only to defend his close friend and neighbor.

A part of James doubtless enjoyed the fray. Alfred North Whitehead once called William James “that adorable genius”; the phrase has stuck, and with it the suggestion that James was gentle and sweet. This misapprehension can obscure the feisty, combative, confrontational side of the man. One day in 1885, when he had three children under the age of six at home, he was riding a Cambridge horsecar into Boston, meditating on the idea his wife had picked up from Kipling that our whole social order and civil life “had for their ultimate sanction nothing but force,” however we might disguise it, and meditating too on his brother Henry’s indignant protests about the “outrageous pertness of the American child.” He became aware of a little five-year-old singing aloud “in such a hoarse, nasal voice that I was on the point of getting out of the car twice.” He summoned, as he told Logan Pearsall Smith, “all sorts of ethical religious and sociological principles to the aid of my trembling courage,” and spoke up politely: “I think, madam, you can hardly be aware that your child’s song is a cause of annoyance to the rest of us in the car.” The mother answered that she couldn’t stop the child. Whereupon a “gallant American” who had been following the exchange broke in indignantly, “How dare you sir, address a lady in this ungentlemanly fashion!” James, stirred up by Kipling’s idea about naked force, fired back, “Sir, if you repeat that remark I shall slap your face.” The man repeated it, James slapped him, and the man “collected the cards of the rest of the passengers, all eager to serve as witnesses in my trial for assault and battery.” There are several versions of this story; Smith says James then told him that the passengers next “all sat down; and as the car clattered along through the dust towards Boston, with the child still shrilly singing, the grave burden of the public disapproval which William James had encountered became almost more, he said, than he could bear.

“He looked from hostile face to hostile face, longing for some sign of sympathy and comprehension, and fixed at last all his hopes on a lady who had taken no part in the uproar, and whose appearance suggested foreign travel perhaps, or at any rate a wider point of view.” When the car reached Boston and they all got out, James addressed this lady. “‘You, madam,’ he said, addressing her, ‘you, I feel sure, will understand.’...Thereupon the lady drew back from him and exclaimed ‘You brute!’”¹⁰ Smith prefaces this account by calling James the most charming man he ever met. James could also be reckless, even cruel. Still, his willingness to tell this story on himself shows that he was at least aware that he could be blind and thus insensitive to the feelings of those around him.

Another of the things demanding James’s time and energy in the fall of 1891 was the psychology laboratory. James had been working in and teaching from laboratories since medical school. It is generally conceded that Wundt set up the first psychology lab in Germany and James the first one in America, though G. S. Hall once disputed this. In 1892 James had gotten $4,300 for his psychology lab at Harvard. His lab course now had eighty students, and he found himself spending four hours a day in the lab. James did a fair amount of laboratory work, for which he has gotten scant credit, largely because he himself frequently complained about the work, groaned over it, and professed himself unfit for it. He once declared, apropos German laboratory investigation, that it couldn’t flourish among a people capable of boredom. Although James had started a lab for psychophysics in 1885, laboratory psychology, as the chemist-president Eliot would have understood it, was not a high priority for James. Indeed, Eliot wrote James in December 1891, “I think your Psychology atones for the absence of laboratory instruction during the past ten years.”¹¹

With his laboratory duties weighing him down, with no major commitment to experimental psychology, and with Eliot’s attitude, James found the psychology lab situation at Harvard untenable, and he soon got Eliot’s permission to sound out a possible replacement, twenty-eight-year-old Hugo Münsterberg of Freiburg. Münsterberg had studied with Wundt, but had come to disagree with him about the will, taking a position closer to James’s own. Münsterberg had published what James called “a little masterpiece” on the subject. As we saw, James had met him at the Paris Congress of Physiological Psychology.

Münsterberg was a tall, solidly built man. A colleague recalled him as looking “trimmed for action. The roving observant blue eye, the springy step, the slight bend in the body in a kind of formal lunge, all suggested alertness.”¹² Charles A. Strong knew him in Germany and reported to James, “He lectures and experiments all day, talks brilliantly in the evening, and then works at his desk till three or four in the morning, writing from fourteen to sixteen printed pages at a sitting.” Münsterberg was still a young man when James described him as “a great force in psychology, a wonderfully active thinker... a teacher whom it is impossible to surpass.”¹³

Would Münsterberg accept a three-year probationary appointment at Harvard? James threw himself into persuading him. He wrote him that Harvard “must lead in Psychology,” that it wanted a first-rate lab director, “a man of genius.” After some negotiations Münsterberg accepted, in early May 1892. James wrote at once: “A telegram arrives from you ‘joyfully accepting the call.’ Gottlob! I believe this has been the best stroke I ever did for our university!” It was a good stroke for himself as well. “It is an enormous relief to me,” he confessed to Münsterberg, “to see the responsibility for experimental Psychology in Harvard transferred from my feeble and unworthy shoulders to those of a man as competent as you.”¹⁴

One thing James could not transfer from his shoulders was his position in the Society for Psychical Research. In February 1892 he had chaired a meeting of the society in New York City and addressed four hundred people on “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.”¹⁵ He admitted to Henry that he loathed the position but that the speech went off well enough. It was a spirited defense of the society as the only place where a “systematic attempt to weigh the evidence for the supernatural” existed. The spiritualists and the theosophists were, he said, “sickened by the methods” of the society, while the scientists, on the other hand, were “sickened by the facts,” leaving the society “in a rather forsaken position.”¹⁶

What most interested James was Frederick Myers’s work on the “subliminal self,” and he approvingly quoted the conclusion that Myers’s studies of “hypnotism, hallucinations, automatic writing, mediumship, and the whole series of allied phenomena” had led him to: “Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or in reserve.”¹⁷

 

The family news from London was grim. Henry wrote on February 6,1892, that Alice’s “weakness increases—her bad times are very very bad and it is weeks and weeks since she has left her bed, which she will evidently never leave again.” Henry wrote long, painful, detailed letters filled with what would have been for anyone but Henry James inexpressible sadness. William, who could only read the letters from afar, no doubt felt helpless. “Her condition is one of great suffering,” Henry wrote on March 2; “that is [the] sad part of it, and she is really a tragic vessel or receptacle, of recurrent, renewable, inexhaustible forms of disease.” On March 5 Alice was unable to talk without bringing on spasms of coughing. She whispered a message for Henry to cable to William: “Tenderest love to all. Farewell. Am going soon.” The next day, in the evening, another telegram came, this time from Henry: “Alice just passed away painless. Wire Bob.”

William immediately telegraphed Henry to make sure the death was really a death and not some sort of “trance trick” of her own susceptible nature. But the next morning reality set in, and William let out his feelings in a letter to Henry, even as Cambridge waited for the London letter that would have all the details. “What a relief!” William wrote. “And yet long as we had thought of it and wished it, it seems too strangely sudden to have it dispatched in the twinkling of a telegram... Poor little Alice! What a life! I can’t believe that that imperious will and piercing judgment are snuffed out with the breath.”

There were many things about Alice and about his own relationship to her that James did not fully understand, but he understood quite a bit about her illness, especially about how she carried it. “Now that her outwardly so frustrated life is over,” he wrote Henry, “one sees that in the deepest sense it was a triumph. In her relation to her disease, her mind did not succumb. She never whined or complained or did anything but spurn it. She thus kept it from invading the tone of her soul... Her life was anything but a failure.”¹⁸

Alice’s body was cremated. Katharine Loring carried the ashes back across the Atlantic, where they were placed in the Cambridge Cemetery lot with her father and mother, in order, as Henry said, that she not become a myth. In the year ahead, William would design a monument for her grave. On it he had inscribed two lines from Dante’s apostrophe to Boethius, the Roman philosopher and author of The Consolation of Philosophy, lines that we may take as a counter to the famous inscription over the entrance to Hades. The lines for Alice read:

 

Ed essa da martire
E da essilio venne a questa pace.

 

(She came from martyrdom and exile to this peace.)¹⁹

 

On the side of the monument were to be the emblems from Henry Senior’s family seal, on one side a serpent with its tail in its mouth, on another a jar with a butterfly escaping.²⁰